Agency scales faster by streamlining SEO workflows
“When sites stay running smoothly it saves our agency time and money. Building on Wix has allowed us to streamline our SEO workflows, and gain more design flexibility in the process. It’s the ultimate win-win.”
10000
Big number
178%
Growth
7X
Wow
The C-suite at Creative Trnd was looking for a better way to grow their clients–and their agency. When they started building on Wix, it became clear that one powerful platform could help them do both.
The business
Creative Trnd is a full-service digital marketing agency based in Quebec, Canada. With a team of 35, they offer everything from web development to influencer marketing. SEO is a major focus for the agency, with SEO clients accounting for 70% of their recurring revenue. In 2021 they doubled their revenue by acquiring another agency, and they have big plans for more acquisitions down the line.
The SEO challenge
Whatever way you slice it, time is money for an agency. Creative Trnd were acutely aware of this fact, as the web creation platforms they were using were taking up far too much dev time. Given the agency’s goal to keep scaling apace, this loss of momentum just didn’t cut it.
“The complexity of working in WordPress was driving my designers crazy,” says Rob May, the agency's VP of Search and Digital Marketing. “When our design team would mock something up, our dev team had to build it and without fail, there were always complications with whatever code they were using inside the platform, or the theme they were using as a base would conflict with everything else. ”
It wasn’t just the agency's designers who were unhappy with these web creation solutions either. Some of their SEO clients were at their wits’ end because of the limitations these platforms presented for their eCommerce businesses.
“We actually have a client who’s not been happy with one of the popular eCommerce platforms for years. He has an international store and never had a multilingual set up. He has to have three versions of his store: one for Canada in English, one for Canada in French, and another for the US. This means he has to pay three subscriptions for hosting, for templates, for apps, credit card processing, and everything else. On the platform he was using, there’s no way to bring it all together under one domain and allow for a multilingual setup.”
From an SEO perspective, situations like these posed a logistical nightmare for the agency. Especially when one of the client’s three sites overtook the others in terms of search visibility; all the traffic started going to the client’s Canadian site, but because of more restrictions on the platform, the site could only handle transactions in Canadian currency. Every minute this problem persisted, the client was basically turning down American dollars.
The solution
Having successfully scaled and sold several agencies throughout his career, Rob was able to recognize that, in order to overcome these challenges, his team needed to work on a more resilient platform that offered his team more flexible design options.
“Wix is the one solution we found that was able to do everything we wanted with one flat fee,” he confirms. “After learning about all the infrastructure advancements and the massive amount of investment Wix put into its SEO capabilities, I understood this was the platform that we needed to scale our agency. It’s a much cleaner solution which makes it way more time and cost effective than other CMSs.”
And he was right—the intuitiveness of the Wix platform meant they no longer had to involve engineers in site builds, which ironically freed them up for more demanding technical tasks associated with other breakage-prone platforms. “We've actually taken a huge portion of the workload off our dev team because our designers can work within the Wix platform and pretty much do whatever they want without breaking anything,” he describes. “Plus, the search and content team can get pages laid out exactly the way they want from a UI perspective. That’s been a hugely positive step forward for us.”
On the client front, Wix now allows them to build websites that support 180 languages under one domain—meaning no more awkward conversations about why clients’ pages are competing with each other in search. The Wix Multilingual feature gives Rob’s team the option of translating site pages manually or automatically, and most crucially of all, it gives them the flexibility to customize each language’s individual SEO settings. They can also now add a currency converter to their sites with the Wix drag and drop editor, giving visitors the peace of mind they need to make a purchase.
The results
Without the need for developer input on Wix site builds, the Creative Trnd team have been able to optimize their workflows in a way that benefits their clients’ pockets and their agency’s bottom line. They’re now making highly strategic decisions when it comes to the placement of their in-house resources, with the result that projects are getting completed in smaller timeframes and budgets. Added to that, Wix’s resilient infrastructure means the agency no longer has to spend time on site fixes, meaning they can allocate client retainers towards the SEO tasks that promise the most ROI.
“Wix is going to be the foundation of how we grow our clients going forward,” Rob states. “We want to build for our clients on Wix and we want to do their SEO and marketing on Wix. Our business development team is doing a great job of showcasing what we’ve achieved and it’s going down really well with clients.”
Another bonus for the agency is that messy client hand-overs have become a thing of the past. “Clients are way happier with the back-end of things and the management of their sites,” Rob says. “Wix is a far more intuitive system for them to learn. Since we started using it over a year ago, I haven’t seen a single WordPress or Shopify proposal go out. Everything is on Wix.”
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